I have said (and so has Angus) that Obama will win in November. That prediction was in part predicated on a belief that the folks in DC could put together some kind of cockamamie "Krugman Model" stimulus that would make measured growth appear to hit the 3% (or so) target required to get the idiots-who-make-up-the-electorate to vote for the incumbent.

So, here is what I think is going to happen. (I have this talk I give to VC groups and annual meetings of investors, and it's really long and has lots of ppt slides. This is the summary, free for all you loyal KPC readers). (And I should also note that my own thinking was influenced by a dinner with LeBron a while back, though of course he is blameless for my getting this wrong).

On a year to year basis, there isn't much actual salary negotiation. The Dean will allocate a raise pool to the department along with instructions on how it is to be allocated. For example, there might be a 4% pool, 2% for across the board raises and 2% for merit (in recent years 0% raise pools have been common). Then the department chair or executive committee will review records and recommend an allocation of the money to professors which has to be approved by the Dean. Then every professor in the department goes to the chair and complains about their raise!

In the longer term, salaries are set by the market. Getting another offer can create competition and sometimes even bidding wars. Sometimes people make the move, other times they get a strong counter-offer and stay.

Econ professors talk about other professors' salaries a fair amount. When they talk about their own, I generally feel like they are, shall we say, less than completely honest.

If you work at a State school the information is public and every so often a newspaper might publish it.

Professors in departments that are hiring at the entry level often compare notes on what their departments are planning to offer new Ph.D.s and where the market for them might clear. New hires tend to negotiate more for 1 time expenses like start up money, moving costs, and temporary teaching reductions, and less on salary where schools often have less flexibility. Deans are seemingly more willing to agree to large-ish one time expenditures more than large recurring expenses like a substantially higher salary for new hires.

An executive at a Palo Alto software giant was charged Monday with four felony counts of burglary, after authorities said he allegedly made his own bar code stickers, switched the tags, and then bought boxes of LEGOs at Target stores for huge discounts.

The guy had nearly 2,500 boxes of LEGOs in his house, and he was selling them on eBay. The thing is that if he was making $50 each, and he sold 2,500, that's still only $50,000. How can that possibly have been worth the time and risk? Amazing.

I took the tube back out of town
Back to the Rollin' Pin
I felt a little like a dying clown
With a streak of Rin Tin Tin

Well, this lady took the Tube back in to town, after having had too much to drink.
And she has a massive streak of Rin Tin Tin, no doubt.

And now she is going to jail. TO. JAIL. For 21 weeks. For causing "harrassment, alarm, and abuse" to the people
who were around her.
Hate is not a crime. She didn't assault anybody, she didn't harm anyone. She is an idiot, sure. But nearly half
a year in JAIL?

As we hear from the Brit press: "Condemning her showdown, District Judge Michael Snow at Westminster Magistrates' Court in central London, said: "Anyone viewing it would feel a deep sense of shame that our citizens could be subject to such behaviour who may, as a consequence, believe that it secretly represents the views of other white people.""

She has to go to jail because she made the judge feel guilty about being white? When he should jail himself, because he feels guilty about being a moron?

A drunk woman being a loud idiot is unremarkable. An advanced nation jailing citizens for voicing opinions, without physical threats or violent actions, is barbaric. Even if those opinions are "hate."
Judge Brandeis had this right: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”—U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), Whitney v. California, 274 U. S. 357 (1927).
(Special bonus points because Brandeis said this in pirate-talk: "Aye, there be time! Don't punish her. Expose her to disagreement! Aarrrrr!")

England chooses enforced silence, even though there was plenty of time to have a conversation about this. True, Ms. Woodhouse will avoid racist rants in the future. Out of the fear of the government and the fact that it has guns and strong-arm thugs to enforce their requirements of obedient silence. NOT because she learned anything, or was educated. But because she is afraid.

Abstract:
Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the
nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to
investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection
or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are
forward-looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable
characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so
undermines democratic accountability because selection renders
sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions,
the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a
retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the
interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that
voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision
problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for
accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral
selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of
empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.

Monday, May 28, 2012

As "pro-bailout" parties take the lead in Greek polls, focus turns more to Spain, where the spread between its 10 year bonds and Germany's broke the 500 basis point barrier, hitting the highest level since the dawn of the Euro.

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Kindred and Thomas have a nice piece in FP about the peripheral-ness of Greece and the low likelihood that a Grexit will cause a global downturn like the US financial crisis did.

I largely agree with their points (though the 97 Asian crisis wasn't a small event to me), even though I recently put up a post asking "Will Greece be Europe's Lehman Brothers"?

Kindred commented on my post making many of the points in the FP piece, but now I can see that we were somewhat using the same words to talk about two different things.

In the US financial crisis, the political decision to let Lehman Brothers go, was the catalyst to all hell breaking loose in US financial markets. I was asking whether a political decision to let Greece go would be the catalyst to all hell breaking loose with the Euro (spurring contagion to produce multiple exits from the Euro)

I still think it could, but that is not to say the global fallout will be anything like the global fallout from the US financial crisis, which is Kindred's point.

Also of note, in this morning's NY Times, LeBron has a piece arguing that the Euro may fall apart altogether, which would probably have greater global consequences that just a southern member exit.